To most Americans, Bill Modell was known as President or Chairman of the Modell stores and his name was synonymous with sports equipment. In 1967, when his son Michael was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, progress in research in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) dramatically changed. Bill joined forces with Irwin Rosenthal, a young and dynamic lawyer, whose wife Suzanne also had Crohn's disease, who asked the key questions, "What do we know about it and what is being done about it?" Together with Henry Janowitz, then the Chief of Gastroenterology at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and later President of the American Gastroenterological Association, along with both Shelby Modell and Suzanne Rosenthal, they launched the Ileitis Foundation, which later became the National Foundation for Ileitis and Colitis, and subsequently the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America (CCFA).
The financing of the CCFA was launched by Bill Modell who, over the next 40 years, provided all of his brilliance as a unique human being and an outstanding businessman to create organization, fundraising, alliances, and the cooperative participation of thousands of people including personal friends, business colleagues, athletes, and patients and their families who suffered with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. The number of gastroenterologists and clinical and basic scientists contributing to research in IBD has accelerated over these 40 years because of the unrelenting efforts of the Modells and the Rosenthals so that today no issue of any journal of gas-